The growth rate of the Internet is unmatched by any other medium in history. The number of U.S. Internet users has grown from 49 million in 1996 to over 96 million as of March 1999. These numbers are expected to increase by at least 20% over the next few years. Accordingly, each day thousands of new users, from all over the world, begin accessing the Internet and using the Internet as a communication and data processing tool. Research has shown that both new users and experienced users see the highest value of the Internet to be as a research tool that allows a user to collect information, including information related to commercial transactions, and information related to entertainment. In fact, Internet users rank searching as their most important activity on the Web with over 50% of all Web-active individuals (approximately 50 million) visiting a search engine each month. However, research has also shown that a major frustration for Internet users is the inability to quickly locate information available on the Internet.
To locate information, a user typically employs a search engine, such as the Yahoo™ or Lycos™ search engines, to identify information of interest. These Internet search engines are services that monitor the content of the Internet, typically focusing on the content provided through the World Wide Web Internet service. While monitoring the content, the company builds a database of index terms that can be associated with different sites, or pages of available on the Internet. For example, two of the leading search engines, Excite.™. and Yahoo.™. employ a staff of editors that browse the content of the World Wide Web and manually classify and index the Web pages they review. Other search engines rely on computer programs to search through the content of the Web and to automatically classify and index the Web pages that are visited. In either approach, when the process is completed a datafile is created that includes thousands of index terms, each of which has been associated with a plurality of pages on the Web. When a user accesses a search engine and submits a keyword, or user query to the search engine, it is this index that is searched and it is the pages associated with keywords related to the user query that are returned to the user as the search results.
Although search engines generally work quite well, they require a certain facility on the part of the user to return accurate and useful results. However, as a large portion of Internet users are novices, the conventional search engine fails to provide a large portion of the Internet population with a help full tool for navigating among the countless web sites.
To help make search engines more accessible and effective, most search engines now give users the option of directory or keyword searches. However, neither of these techniques is truly sufficient, and frustration among search engine users is increasing. Some studies have shown that having a keyword search on a particular site is actually less helpful than having people navigate through links. This inability of users to find what they are searching for is one reason why most search engines share much of their audience with the competition. While satisfaction with search engines remains high, it has dropped recently. Moreover, this frustration might also explain why approximately 25% of all people who try the Internet become discouraged and never return.
To address these issues, many search engines are attempting to improve performance by modifying the back end-determining what pages should be catalogued and how. One web search engine uses the popularity of a site to rank its relevance. Another uses a question and answer paradigm to match related queries. Various metacrawlers, which return results from a number of different search engines, take into account the problems of shared audience. However, the interfaces of these search engines differ little beyond the cosmetic.
So far, only a few search engines have tackled the problem of the front-end interface. That is, how to get the user to give more information, so the resultant search query is more directed and effective. One has constructed a paradigm in which people ask a question, then choose among a list of alternative questions. These pre-determined questions have known answers among the sites catalogued by the search sites. Other search engines have users enter the search string in one of a number of different categories (e.g., Jobs, Medicine, and Sports) and then send the query to different search engines.
Neither of these methods is ideal. The search engine market thus needs an interface that allows novice users to produce effective search queries, allow for disambiguating words with multiple meanings, and learn from previous interactions with a client to more quickly focus on the real interests of a user.